There’s truth to what you’re hearing, all open source software is suffering.
Part of the allure of rolling releases for the places that have to maintain them is less maintaining! Debian does need maintainers.
Debian does ship old packages, that’s the point of “stable”, to be tested and known not to cause problems.
Free software is political. It’s literally not possible for there to have been more time spent discussing what to put on the website than looking for maintainers and updating packages, and part of stability isn’t active testing but instead time spent in active use.
Debian is on the same path it’s always been on, and reports of its imminent demise are exaggerated.